The myth
has always been that French critics in 1946 coined the term “film
noir” to describe what the critics noted as changes in Hollywood crime
films when they finally saw the films that weren’t available during
the Nazi occupation. This story clearly isn’t true and Charles O’Brien
who researched the use of “film noir” before the war in Film
Noir In France: Before The Liberation documents how that term was used
in the newspapers and magazines of Paris during the 1930s.

O’Brien
makes the case that discussion of the film noirs of pre-war France
were dismissed in the postwar film noir studies due to the writings of Raymond
Borde and Etiene Chaumeton in A Panorama of American FilmNoir,
1941-1953. “According to Borde and Chaumeton,” O’Brien
writes, “certain prewar films directed by Marcel Carné, Julien
Duvivier and Jean Renoir are only superficially similar to American film noir
because the French films are exclusively ‘realist.’ (...) For
Borde and Chaumeton, the French films belonged to the past whereas the Hollywood
films manifest a new, distinctively postwar sensibility.” (Deletion
in original.)

“The
single sentence in Panorama du film noir américain,”
continues O’Brien, “that alludes to prior discussion in France
of film noir implies that such discussion was inconsequential. Later studies
of film noir accept this suggestion at face value and even go as far as to
attribute origins of the term solely to the postwar writings of critics such
as Nino Frank.”

Since
we now know that Nino Frank and Jean Pierre Chartier (the other French
critic) used “film noir” as a reference and not as a coinage,
this essay – using the work of O’Brien, contemporary reviews,
other writings, as well as the films cited – will try and show how that
discussion played out. I have no intention of defining “film noir”
or even suggesting that such a translation from 1930s France to present-day
wherever is even possible. Having spent a good deal of time watching the French
and American films and reading incoherent and inaccurate academic flapdoodle,
I think it’s time someone took the razor and hacked off the nonsense
and wild suppositions to see what lies beneath.

O’Brien
points out that the term “film noir” seems to have been
coined by the political rightwing and that may be because many – but
not all – of the film noirs were from the poetic realist movement that
was closely associated with the leftist Popular Front. While that may indeed
be the case, I don’t think those political motivations are as important
as the particulars cited as to why these films were noir. The term “film
noir” also crossed political lines as its usage became more common and
the reaction to these films are so extreme that politics can’t be seen
as the only basis for the criticism.

“Far
from a manifestation of critical detachment,” O’Brien
writes, “references to film noir during the [pre-war years] often entailed
denunciations of the moral condition of the cinema in France. Although critics
during the late 1930s discussed film noir in terms of major developments in
film history – tracing it to antecedents in German Expressionism and
to French films such as ‘Sous les toits de Paris’ [Rene Clair’s
‘Under The Roofs of Paris’ 1930] – they typically attributed
to film noir cultural connotations that were unambiguously negative.”

Five
of the films are of the poetic realism movement (although as with
anything else that could be debated): “The Lower Depths,” “Pépé
le Moko,” Port of Shadows,” “La Bête Humaine”
and “Le Jour se lève.” The other four films contain similar
themes. In three of the films the protagonist commits suicide and suicide
plays a role in two other films. In three of the films the protagonist is
incarcerated or executed by the state. In one film the protagonist is killed
senselessly. Three films have wives conspiring with lovers to kill husbands.
In two films the protagonist survives with a lover although what follows that
survival isn’t clear and in one film one lover is shot in a botched
suicide pact. What also isn’t clear is whether there are more films
called “noirs” that will show up with subsequent research and
whether similar and earlier films made before the term “film noir”
first hit ink are also film noirs.

The film
noirs considered part of the poetic realism movement have a visual
style that would influence the American crime film made both during and after
the war with “Port of Shadows” being the most obvious example,
the other films are made in different styles. The remaining films – “Hôtel
du Nord” and “Le Dernier Tournant” – are filmed in
a more conventional style although the content contains murder or suicide
and the other social taboos that are a mainstay of the film noirs.

None
of these films are about private detectives hard-boiled or otherwise
and none of them are police procedurals or stories where the police –
or any member of governmental society – are seen as heroic. The films
are about the working class and those below the working class or, in a few
films, what was once referred to as the Lumpenproletariat. In fact,
there isn’t a single crime film – as that term is conventionally
used – in the list. “Pépé Le Moko,” a film
that centers on a fugitive criminal hiding in the Casbah of Algiers, is a
film about memory and desire more than anything else and its suicide ending
has to do with facing what the character believes he has lost and not the
possibility of incarceration.

While
I haven’t yet managed to find a copy of “Le Puritan,”
IMBd.com contains this – in part – as a plot synopsis: “A
religious fanatic finds his entire life and philosophy turned upside-down
as he falls in love with a girl and kills her in a jealous rage. His search
is for peace of mind and a desire to justify the murder of the girl to himself.
His mind becomes distraught as he gropes trying to rationalize his deed and
his world falls apart around him.”

Pauline
Kael remarked in her review:

“Jean-Louis
Barrault was [. . .] perfect for Liam O'Flaherty's psychological
study of the murderer Ferriter,” wrote Kael, “a righteous reformer
and sexually obsessed religious fanatic. Barrault's acting was so unusually
objective that one respected this poor devil even at his most hopelessly self-deceived.
[“Le Puritan”], condemned by New York's State Board of Censors
in toto as ‘indecent, immoral, sacrilegious, tending to incite to crime
and corrupt morals,’ is in perfectly good taste, but the censors had
a reason for their stand: Ferriter is not only conceived as a censor type,
he's actually engaged in this work in the film.”

The New
York State Board of Censors would feel right at home reading the
film criticism in some of the Paris newspapers. Writing in Action française
in January 1938, the critic Francois Vinneuil called “Le Puritan”
“a classic subject: the film noir, plunging into debauchery and crime.”

O’Brien
notes that “It is appropriate that Vinneuil should refer to
Le Puritain as a film noir because the film’s protagonist, played with
theatricality by Barrault, is a young editorialist for the daily L’Etoile
du matin whose denunciations of ‘foreign filth and atheist propaganda’
are so excessive that the paper’s editor fires him. Among the most prominent
film critics of the [pre-war era], Vinneuil employed the term film noir in
reviews that contributed to an evolving debate on the issues of film realism.”

As noted
above, state censors in the US and the Motion Picture Production
Code – commonly known as the Hays Office – in Hollywood were banning
or refusing to give a seal – the only way a film could be shown in the
major theatre chains – to movies considered unfit for audiences. In
these cases, morality played a major role in the decision to ban or not to
ban. “Hence,” the Production Code reads, “the sympathy of
the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil
or sin.” Although France had censors – Jean Vigo’s “Zéro
de conduite” was banned in 1933 and Jean Renoir’s “The Rules
of the Game” was banned in 1939 – none of the so-called “film
noirs” were banned.

Another
example that O’Brien cites of how “film noir” was
used is when “Port of Shadows” won the Grand Prix National du
Cinéma Français in 1939. An editorial in Petit-journal
read, “It is distressing to see the most official of French film prizes,
the Prix du Ministère, awarded to a film — full of artistic qualities,
certainly — but of a very special type. A film noir, an immoral and
demoralizing film, whose effect on the public could only be harmful.”

The French
critics weren’t the only ones
to notice. On October 30, 1939, Frank S Nugent wrote in his review in The
New York Times:

“[Port
of Shadows] is nothing more than a lament for the living expressed somberly
by a camera greedy for shots of rain and fog, by a writer who has looked at
life through gray-tinted glasses, seeing nothing but its drabness, its sordidness
and the futility of those who expect anything more of it. Havre is its scene.
Its central figure, the unsmiling embodiment of man's hopelessness, is a deserting
French soldier who has come to the Port of Shadows out of the rain, dreaming
miserably of finding sanctuary somewhere, possibly in Venezuela, where the
liner warped to the quay is going.”

Nugent
continues, that “There is a bitterness even in its humor—in
the character of the tiny longshoreman whose ambition is some day to sleep
between sheets in a clean bed, in that of the ship's doctor who once had wanted
to be an artist, in that of the artist who could not paint a swimmer without
seeing him drown and so drowned himself. No, it's a thorough-going study in
blacks and grays, without a free laugh in it; but it is also a remarkably
beautiful motion picture from the purely pictorial standpoint and a strangely
haunting drama. As a steady diet, of course, it would give us the willies;
for a change it's as tonic as a raw Winter's day.”

As the
creator of three of the nine noirs mentioned, Carné came in
for more heat from the critics than the others. Georges Sadoul, a leftist
critic and a supporter of the realist school, “stated an ambivalence”
toward Carné’s films writing, “We sincerely hope that Carné
will soon abandon the philosophy of his circle. His talent, which is very
great, will attain a new stage of its development when it truly apprehends
the reality of society, and not just its margin, its foam.” Sadoul,
who assessed the film in political terms, suggested – according to O’Brien
– that the kind of milieu depicted in “Quai des brumes”
was likely to “produce not progressive revolutionaries but the kind
of thugs likely to join fascist [gangs].”

Jean
Renoir also objected to “the crazy, immoral, dishonest individuals”
who populated the world of Carné’s film. Even those who made
films described as “noir” by one critic or another, had issues
with the content of the “noirs” of other directors although the
conversation never centered on what constitutes or defines a film noir. Renoir’s
criticism of Carné is odd considering that Renoir’s films feature
murders, suicides, alcoholics, and other “immoral and dishonest individuals.”

In an
odd turn of eventsMarianne, the magazine that had serialized
James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1936 was under
new management in 1939 and renamed Marianne Magazine. It reviewed
Pierre Chenal’s “Le Dernier Tournant” – the first
film version of that Cain novel – and remarked:

“Here
is another film noir, a film of this sinister series which begins
with Les Bas-fonds and [Crime and Punishment], and continues with Pépé
le Moko and Quai des Brumes, La Bête Humaine and Hôtel du Nord.
[. . .] We begin to be weary of this special atmosphere, of these hopes doomed
to failure; of these figures that implacable destiny drives towards decay
and death. It is time that the French screen becomes clearer. […] It
seems unfortunate that the French school of cinema should be represented by
films that express only the inability of men to live a normal life, by films
that are only long poems of discouragement. No pity humanizes Pierre Chenal’s
film, which was drawn from a novel published in this newspaper.” (Second
deletion in original.)

It is
necessary to take a turn of our own here. One of several that will
deal with James M Cain’s work. In 1934, Jean Renoir – one of the
driving forces for realism in film in France at that time – directed
a film titled “Toni” that was shot on location using untrained
actors, two qualities that would later appear regularly in the neo-realists’
works. Although many people consider this film to be the first neo-realist
film, Renoir denied it and cited previous inspirations. His assistant director
on “Toni” was Luchino Visconti. Renoir’s nephew, Claude,
was the cinematographer on “Le Dernier Tournant” and Jean Renoir
sometime in the late 1930s gave his copy of the Cain novel to Visconti who
would – some three years later – direct “Obsession,”
arguably the best version of The Postman Always Rings Twice ever
to hit a movie screen. The Visconti film would also inspire – among
other precursors – the Italian neo-realist movement.

Whether
or not Visconti knew that critics in Paris had written that “Le
Dernier Tournant” was a “film noir” isn’t known. What
also isn’t known is whether the term “film noir” ever traveled
beyond Paris in 1939. What did travel was the idea of realism wrapped around
dark stories and when it broke free in Italy after the war, the neo-realists
– as they would be called – weren’t in the mood for poetics.
Even so, the similarities of the two movements are contained in films with
an unrelentingly view of “demoralization” and “decay and
death” – as the French critics might write. In early works such
as “Germany Year Zero,” “Bitter Rice,” “La terra
trema,” and in the later period in films such as “Il Grido,”
“La Strada,” and “Il Bedone,” the spirit of film noir
is as clear as it is in Chenal, Duvivier, Renoir or Carné. During the
1930s, the Italians called some of the films made from 1938 to 1945 that featured
a glamorous view of Italy under the fascists, “white telephone movies.”
Whether there is a term such as film nera buried in the archives
of the Italian newspapers remains to be seen.

The connotation
of “film noir,” according to Film Noir In France:
Before The Liberation is “unambiguously negative” and is
described by the French and American critics in a litany that contains, “doomed
to failure,” “long poems of discouragement,” “lament
for the living,” “immoral and demoralizing film,” “indecent,
immoral, sacrilegious,” full of “debauchery and crime” whose
“effect on the public could only be harmful.”

There
will always be films of “discouragement and failure”
that are “indecent, immoral and sacrilegious.” Rarely do they
appear in clusters as they did in pre-war France or post-war Italy. With a
few rare exceptions, films with the sensibilities that the “film noirs”
contained wouldn’t appear in the US until the late 1960s when the Production
Code morphed into the Motion Picture Association of American and the rating
system was introduced. There is a simple reason for this and that the “film
noirs” of France were – in some cases – indictments of society
and humanity and that riled political sensitivities on both sides of the spectrum.
In the United States the Production Code was in place to see that it didn’t
happen in Hollywood.

As O’Brien
notes in Film Noir In France: Before The Liberation: “As
Carné himself had observed, as early as September 1940, the same French
films that had won major national and international awards in 1938 and 1939
seemed to have become indelibly tainted, forever indicative of a mentality
now identified as the very cause of the national defeat.”

In 1946,
two French critics revived the use of the term “film noir.”
And that’s were the trouble really begins . . .